Abstract
While contextual and interpretive approaches to money have recently emerged in archaeology, coins have attracted little serious attention in the post-medieval archaeology of the western world. The relative neglect of coins as archaeological finds probably derives from an (implicit) assumption that the function and meaning of coins is readily apparent.
A close study of coin finds, however, combined with various sources of contextual data, can provide new views on how people understood and engaged with coinage even in the comparatively recent past, as this article seeks to illustrate by considering money and coin finds from a northern periphery of early modern Sweden. Economic factors are important for appreciating the significance of coinage and the patterning of the studied coin finds, but this article proposes that non-monetary uses of coins were more important to the local understanding of money than has previously been recognized.
Introduction
Given that money has played an important role in the development of the modern western world and its institutions, including the growth of capitalism, there is a certain irony that coin finds have been given little serious thought in post-medieval or modern world historical archaeology. A main reason for the neglect of coins is probably that their function and meanings are considered self-evident: coins are money and money, supposedly, is a standardized medium of exchange (Myrberg, 2010: 157). This characteristically modern view that literally takes coins ‘on face value’ is, however, problematic when studying money in contexts other than the contemporary western world. Although scholars have tended to project modern western notions of money onto money in general, and ancient coinage in particular, money can only be properly understood in relation to the broader cultural matrix in which it exists and is put to use (Bloch and Parry, 1989: 1).
This article considers money in a northern periphery of early modern Sweden, which is now part of Finland (Figure 1), focusing specifically on how people understood and engaged with coins, and how attitudes to money were linked to broader ideas of materiality and everyday life. When the first towns were founded on the northernmost rim of the Baltic Sea in the early seventeenth century, coinage still played a minor role in the economic life of local farming communities, even though it had been known for some centuries. The amount of money in circulation was nonetheless increased and coinage became more commonly used in this northern periphery. Yet money in the early modern period was in many ways fundamentally different from money today, as was the world in general, and it is against this background that the uses and understanding of coins and coinage are considered in this article.
The six sites discussed in the article (Oulu, Hailuoto, Tornio, Oravaisensaari, Kainuunkylä, Ylikylä) are located in present-day north-western Finland. The circles mark urban sites, squares rural sites, and the triangle a church site.
The article begins with and centres on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century coins which are fairly common finds at early modern sites in Sweden – including Finland, which was a province of Sweden until 1809 – but rarely studied as archaeological finds and material culture. Apart from their obvious use as tools for dating contexts, ordinary coin finds have been of limited interest in the post-medieval archaeology of Finland and Sweden. One probable reason for that neglect, as mentioned above, is the supposedly self-evident function of coins. Secondly, millions of coins were minted in Sweden during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and those coins are well known and documented by collectors and others, so the study of archaeological coin finds may appear to have little to offer. Thirdly, it seems to be assumed that in circumstances other than deliberate hoarding, coins ended up in archaeological deposits mainly through casual loss, which undermines the perceived usefulness of coin finds for the study of the post-medieval past. A close study of coin finds, however, combined with various sources of contextual data, can provide new insights into how people understood and engaged with money. It will be argued that non-monetary and belief-related uses of coins must be considered not as separate from some supposed ‘actual’ or ‘proper’ function of coinage, but rather as integral to a culturally embedded understanding of coinage in a northern periphery of early modern Europe.
Views on money, markets, and monetization
It has been suggested that money markets first appeared in Greece, and more specifically Athens, in the fifth and fourth centuries BC (Polanyi et al., 1957). John Collis has argued that the eventual spread of low-value bronze coinage to western Europe, initially to central Gaul in the first century AD, created ‘a new way of life’ where the social function of high value metals such as gold and silver as prestige gifts was forced to incorporate a new level of everyday small-scale exchanges in markets using copper and bronze coins (Collis, 1971: 77). Collis’s functional and theoretical interpretation of late Iron Age coinage in Britain aimed to re-think the pseudo-historical explanatory models which were prevalent in the 1970s, and which saw the spread of uninscribed low-value coinage to southern Britain as evidence of invasion or colonization by Gaulish refugees, and the later appearance of inscribed coins as evidence of tribal expansion and political consolidation (Allen, 1958).
Economic and functionalist explanations for coin distributions have held sway ever since. The apparent increase in the rate of accidental loss of small value copper coins in Roman Britain after c.AD 260, for example, has been explained in terms of a down-turn in the market value of such coins. Whereas gold and silver coins are generally thought to have retained their value in the Roman world, copper coins, which had only a token value, became debased, and, according to Reece, ‘almost accidentally’ came to be of use to everyday small-scale transactions: ‘copper coins ran down to a minimal size, which we find fiddly, scrappy, worthless, deplorable, almost indecent as money, yet which the market stalls may have found very useful’ (1988: 52–53).
The dominance of economic approaches notwithstanding, cultural and social dimensions of money have also been addressed in various historical and cultural contexts over the last 20 years or so (e.g. Lauer, 2008; Parry and Bloch, 1989; Zelizer, 1989). In archaeology, non-monetary functions of money have mainly been considered in the contexts of classical, early medieval, or medieval Europe (e.g. Casey, 1986; Casey and Reece, 1974; Clarke and Schia, 1989; Creighton, 2000; Garipzanov, 2005; Kurke, 1999; Papadopoulos, 2002; Reece, 2003; Theuws, 2004). More symbolic explanations for the possible intentional disposal of copper coins have arisen, for example, from work on late Iron Age sites in the Netherlands, where Kok has suggested that the physical qualities and colours of objects and the presence of deities on Roman coins acted as a factor determining their choice for deposition as ceremonial offerings (2008: 133). An investigation into the use of copper coinage at Songo Mnara, on the Swahili coast of East Africa, has similarly revealed ‘a rich world of symbolism that goes beyond the simple use of copper coins for “petty exchange”’, suggesting that coins bearing images of particularly powerful or famous sultans remained in use for a long time as they were thought to be linked to the power of the sultan (Wynne-Jones and Fleisher, 2012: 34).
Myrberg’s (2008, 2010) recent research on early medieval coinage on the Baltic Sea island of Gotland is worth mentioning in particular because it engages with several themes that are also at the heart of the present article. Myrberg emphasizes that modern ideas of money should not be projected onto an essentially non-monetized society and stresses the importance of studying coins as material culture, with due attention to archaeological context and the biographies of coins. Kemmers and Myrberg also make the important point, with which we wish to engage, that the archaeological study of coins and coinage has the capacity to ‘offer profound insights not only into matters of economy and the “big history” of issuers and state organization but also into “small histories”, cultural values and the agency of humans and objects’ (2011: 87).
Coinage in medieval and later Sweden and beyond
Coins begin to appear in some numbers in southern Scandinavia and Finland during the Viking Age in the late first millennium AD (e.g. Jonsson, 2005; Talvio, 2009). While the earliest coin minting in Sweden dates back to around AD 1000, only a limited number of coins were in circulation early in the second millennium (Tingström, 1972: 8–9). The role and significance of coinage in the economies of the medieval Nordic countries has been a matter of interest and debate (e.g. Gullbekk, 2005; Klackenberg, 1992), but coins were arguably in common use in Sweden by the fourteenth century (Von Heijne, 2009: 161, 171–176). The activities of the Hanseatic League intensified trade on the Gulf of Bothnia around the same time and coinage became more common on the peripheral northern shores of the Gulf; however, northern trade continued to be based primarily on exchange and the significance of coinage to the local economy was limited until the eighteenth century (Nurmi, 2011: 119–120 with references).
The minting of coins increased in Sweden from the fifteenth century onwards, when the Crown started to demand that taxes should be paid in cash (Luukko, 1954: 234; Nurmi, 2011: 119–120; Virrankoski, 1973: 519). Sweden, like many other European states, wrestled with a shortage of cash in the early modern period, and various measures were taken to solve this problem, ranging from the sponsoring of alchemists to the invention of ‘credit coinage’ in the later seventeenth century (Wennerlind, 2003). The first banknotes in Europe were introduced in Sweden in the early 1660s and were developed from tokens used by mining companies (Hyötyniemi, 1978: 184–186; Lappalainen, 2007: 100–101; Nurmi, 2011: 123).
The adoption of banknotes marked a significant step towards a ‘modern’ idea of money, as money now came to represent value instead of ‘carrying’ it in the form of the material that money was made of. Money, as Simmel (1992[1900]) has observed, became a matter of social trust and contributed to broader cultural and social changes. Money arguably played an important role in the birth of the modern world because it promoted larger-scale rationalization and standardization, which included measuring in standard units and the prioritizing of quantities over qualities (Zelizer, 1989: 344–348). ‘The introduction of credit-money’, writes Wennerlind, ‘mirrored the transition toward a mechanical worldview, in which humans had claimed center stage. The economy had now been emancipated from the neo-Platonic nature-universe complex, and humankind had acquired the power to manage and control its own affairs’ (2003: 255).
This grand narrative of how money changed the world has been subject to critique (e.g. Bloch and Parry, 1989; Maurer, 2006), but we do not wish to engage with that debate here. The important point is simply that money, as it is understood today, is a relatively recent development and that present-day notions of coinage must not be assumed to be automatically valid in the pre-industrial past (Edvinsson, 2009: 2). For example, the worth of money is relatively stable and controlled in the western world today and money can thus be trusted. This was not the case in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Sweden where monetary politics could be rather incomprehensible from a modern point of view and coinage subject to cycles of inflation and deflation that are generally unknown in the modern world. This volatility must also have affected people’s perceptions of and relationships with money. The case of Swedish copper coinage illustrates these issues and enables them to be pursued in more detail.
Copper and copper coinage in post-medieval Sweden
Copper, iron, and forest products formed the backbone of Sweden’s economy in the early modern period. Sweden was the leading producer of copper in Europe in the seventeenth century when demand for the metal was high and other European sources in decline. The great mine at Falun, for example, in south-central Sweden, produced two-thirds of all European copper, with an average output of more than 2000 tons of copper each year during its peak production period in the mid-seventeenth century (Heckscher, 1954: 175–176). Domestic metal production was a major interest of the state for economic and ideological reasons, and resulted in the founding of the Board of Mines in 1637 and something of a mining fever in the kingdom (e.g. Lappalainen, 2007). The effects of that fever reached the northern periphery of Sweden, where mines and forges were established in the seventeenth century, although ultimately only one of the forges (Köngänen) proved to be a success, and only for a short time (Awebro, 1993: 361; Hyötyniemi, 1978: 206; Lappalainen, 2007: 87–89).
The Swedish domination of European copper production in the seventeenth century was not without problems. Because the country needed the tax revenue from domestic metal production, the Swedish Crown maintained a high level of output, but worried about the effect of overproduction on the price of copper in international markets. To solve this dilemma, the Crown decided to mint excess copper into coins, with the aim of withholding copper from international markets while increasing the amount of cash in the kingdom (Lappalainen, 2007: 86–96; Tingstöm, 1984: 24–25). Copper coins were introduced in 1624, but it soon became clear that the Crown’s plan had failed. Monetary transactions had increased, but coins flowed out of the country to be re-melted, and thus continued to affect the price of copper, which in turn resulted in dramatic fluctuations in the value of copper coins for the next hundred years (Lappalainen, 2007: 86–96; Tingström, 1972: 12, 1984: 24–25; Wolontis, 1936).
The Swedish monetary system in the early modern period was complex and rather confusing from today’s point of view. The system dated back to the early second millennium and was based on the mark (c.210 g) of silver (Tingström, 1972: 7–9). The value of coins in domestic circulation had been bound to the value of silver since the Middle Ages, but the Swedish Crown introduced a dual standard with the introduction of copper coinage: copper coins and later copper plate money (see further Tingström, 1984) were bound to the value of copper. At first, however, the new copper standard (henceforth KM, for kopparmynt) was also bound to the value of silver and silver coinage (henceforth SM, for silfermynt) in a fixed ratio which assumed a stable relationship between the relative values of the two metals.
The price of copper plunged by 50 per cent within a few years after the introduction of copper coinage. This forced the Swedish Crown to discontinue the minting of copper coins and to invalidate their nominal value in 1629, and again in 1631. Sweden introduced an actual dual standard in 1633 that completely separated the copper standard from the value of silver. The separation of the two standards did not improve the situation, however, and Sweden was forced to introduce the first nominal-value coin in the 1665 coinage reform. The 1/6 öre SM coin introduced in 1666 was a copper coin but bound to the silver standard. After the 1665 reform, then, the metal of which coins were made of and the metal to which their value was bound were not necessarily the same. For example, the 1 öre KM copper coin and the 1 öre SM copper coin from the mid-eighteenth century look very similar, but the latter was around four times more valuable than the former because its value was based on the current value of silver.
In the years following the 1665 coinage reform, the value of KM-based coinage continued to fluctuate with the price of copper, and occasional high inflation, until the early eighteenth century when the situation finally stabilized; all the coin types that were minted in 1717 were in use until the coinage reform in 1776, when both KM and SM standards were discontinued and Swedish coinage was bound to the value of new riksdaler. Yet despite the abolishment of the pre-1776 system, old coins of small nominal value remained in circulation until the early nineteenth century (Jonsson, 2005: 20; Lagerqvist and Nathorst-Böös, 1999: 11; Lappalainen, 2007: 92–96; Nurmi, 2011: 120–121; Tingström, 1972: 11–16; Wolontis, 1936). Whereas the value of copper and copper coins fluctuated in early modern Sweden, the value of silver was more stable (Nurmi, 2011: 98). The value of Swedish silver coins did, however, vary a little in the late seventeenth century when inflation peaked at 800 per cent (Jonsson, 2005: 18).
The minting of copper coins in Sweden was episodic and at best highly erratic, especially in the seventeenth century, when huge amounts of copper were released in brief pulses, followed by long periods of time when no coins were issued. A similar situation existed in Georgian England, on the brink of industrialization. Between 1754 and 1797, copper coins were only issued in 1770–1775, leading to an epidemic of counterfeiting and the introduction of copper tokens to pay workers by some industrialists (Boon, 1974: 95).
The most commonly minted early modern Swedish copper coins.
Notes: KM and SM refer to copper and silver standards, respectively, and do not necessarily indicate the actual material used for coins, as explained in the main text. *KM = copper standard; **SM = silver standard; ***Over 30 million 1 daler (SM) coins were re-minted into 1 öre (KM) coins in 1719–1721 (Tingström, 1972: 300). ****The number of minted coins not available, ratio calculated from the value of annual total coinage.
Copper coin assemblages from early modern sites in northern Finland
Copper coins are common finds at seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sites in northern Finland, which at that time was a peripheral region of the Swedish realm. In this section we provide a brief overview of coin assemblages from different types of sites, including two urban sites, three rural sites, and a church (Figure 1). Even a fairly general treatment and comparison of these assemblages reveals some intriguing patterns (for a fuller discussion and presentation of the material, see Nurmi, 2011: 68–69, 117–126; Nurmi et al., 2009).
We begin with the small town of Tornio which is located on the northernmost Gulf of Bothnia. When King Gustav II Adolf of Sweden founded Tornio in 1621, it was the northernmost town in Europe and was licensed to control trade over a huge area in Lapland, in the uppermost reaches of Fennoscandia. Tornio prospered in the second half of the seventeenth century, but was devastated by Russian forces during the Great Northern War (1700–1721), only to rise again and flourish after the War, in the mid–late eighteenth century. Excavations in Tornio have recovered c.200 coins, the majority of which derive from one particular open-area excavation.
Coin finds from the studied sites.
Notes: OS = Oravaisensaari, KK = Kainuunkylä, YK = Ylikylä, HL = Hailuoto, TO = Tornio (coins from the 2002 excavations at the Rakennustuote and Ryhmäkoti lots), OU = Oulu (coins from the excavations at the NMKY [YMCA] lot).
The key observation, however, is that some types of coins appear to have been lost or discarded far more than others, and neither face value nor differences in the physical size of coins explains the observed patterns; while copper coins sometimes ended up in archaeological contexts in large quantities, smaller silver coins of the same value did not. It is worth noting here that the early modern Swedish copper coins which we refer to in this article were much larger in size than the thin and tiny silver coins of the same nominal value. On this basis, silver coins would presumably have been more easily lost than copper coins, but instead they seem to have been more readily retained (Nurmi et al., 2009).
An examination of coin finds from the town of Oulu, which is located some 100 km southeast of Tornio and was founded in 1605, shows that the coin assemblage is also dominated by seventeenth-century coins (Table 2). The coin finds from rural sites show a different pattern, however, and differ from the urban assemblages of Tornio and Oulu in two general ways.
First, coin finds are much fewer at rural than urban sites and these differences cannot be reduced to simple economic explanations, such as the function or status of the studied sites, as discussed below. To begin with, a majority of the studied contexts of coin finds in both rural and urban settings in the present study are associated with domestic residences. The argument could be made that townsfolk in early modern Sweden were more actively involved in trade and monetary transactions than their country cousins, and that this might once again explain the concentration of coin finds in urban contexts. While this assumption may hold true to some extent, there is no reason to lean too heavily on this explanation. The infrastructure and functions of buildings in early modern small towns in northern Sweden were relatively non-differentiated and there were, for instance, no shops. Trade took place in merchants’ homes, in an open market area, or on the streets lining the harbour, where purpose-built warehouses were located. While merchants lived in nominally urban settings, their ways of life in such peripheral towns as Tornio reflected and were in many ways embedded in rural culture. Second, eighteenth-century coins are, again in contrast to the urban sites, more commonly found on the rural sites than seventeenth-century coins (Nurmi et al., 2009).
The coin finds from the old church at Hailuoto show a different patterning. Excavations at the site produced a large assemblage of coins (399 finds) dating from the fifteenth to the twentieth century (Paavola, 1988, 1991, 1995). Some coin types clearly dominate the assemblage, but the distribution of different coin types is more balanced – or closer to an expected ‘random’ patterning – than at the other sites discussed above. For instance, the Hailuoto assemblage includes types of coins which were minted in large quantities but are rarely found in archaeological contexts. Once again, the composition of the assemblage cannot be explained by accidental loss, the small denomination, or physical size.
The coins found in the church are commonly understood to be casual losses, and are thought to have slipped through the gaps between the loosely fitting planks of the church floor. The Hailuoto assemblage does not really support this assumption, however. To begin with, small thin silver coins should have dropped through the floor more easily than large thick copper coins. Furthermore, although the distribution of coin types in the church context is more even than in residential contexts, there are reasons to believe that some coins at least were intentionally deposited with the dead buried under the floor and/or dropped between the planks as ‘offerings’ to the deceased (Nurmi, 2011: 125; Paulaharju, 1914: 107; see also Grinder-Hansen, 1988: 115–126).
The selection of ‘coins for the ancestral dead’ was, however, undertaken with due care for the living, giving some credence to the functionalist view that ‘the coin material available for study from site finds will represent what the original owners could best afford to lose’ (Casey, 1974: 38). Coins that had lost their value or had been discontinued appear to be more common in the Hailuoto assemblage, suggesting that otherwise ‘useless’ coins were still thought to be suitable for deposition and to serve as a currency in the afterlife (Nurmi, 2011: 124–126). A similar interpretation has been put forward to explain the inclusion of copper coins in medieval burials in Italy, where the low-value of the coins was deemed to make them ‘good’ (inasmuch as they were available to all) and therefore suitable for the afterlife, where the dead had eschewed worldly goods and material wealth (Travaini, 2004: 172).
The above observations demonstrate, or at least imply, a number of things. The most obvious point is that there are clear differences between the coin finds from different (types of) sites. It is possible in principle, of course, that the observed differences between the studied coin assemblages reflect non-homogenous patterns of the circulation of coins within the area of study. While it is impossible to know the impact of this kind of factor on the studied coin assemblages with any certainty, there are also no reasons to believe, as far as we are aware, that the differences between the assemblages could be reduced to differential availability of types of coinage. The possibility must therefore be seriously considered that people engaged, for whatever specific reasons, with coinage differently in different places and situations. The composition of the assemblages would certainly appear to suggest that coins did not end up in archaeological contexts only through the random process of occasional loss.
It seems, therefore, that certain coin types were intentionally discarded. The most commonly found coins, such as 1/4 öre KM coins of Queen Christina and 1/6 öre SM coins of King Carl XI, are also those that lost much of their value in a short time. Some intriguing questions about archaeological coin finds remain, however, even if it is accepted that coins were intentionally discarded rather than accidentally lost. A closer look at archaeological contexts is needed before exploring those questions further. In our next example, a coin assemblage from Tornio is investigated to find out if contextual information can provide further insights into how coins ended up in archaeological deposits. For example, is it possible to tell intentionally discarded coins apart from those that became deposited through some other mechanism? The results of this contextual approach are difficult to interpret, but they nonetheless offer some clues as to the multiple meanings attached to coins and coinage.
Coins and contexts: A closer look at coin finds from Tornio
The coin finds discussed in this section derive from a large-scale excavation conducted in Tornio in 2002. Two large trenches were cut through a number of early modern house plots. The remains of several wooden buildings were investigated, along with associated yard layers. The finds recovered by these interventions are typical of European early modern urban sites and include animal bones, various classes of imported pottery, clay pipes, bottle and vessel glass, and a variety of small finds. While there are differences between the finds from different (types of) contexts, the distribution of the archaeological material may be characterized by its homogeneity. Very few contexts stand out as particularly rich or otherwise ‘special’ in terms of the finds that they yielded.
A total of 187 coins, predominantly of copper, were found. Almost 85 per cent of the coins were found in contexts associated more or less directly with building remains. The number of coins found in association with the remains of individual buildings varies from three to as many as 59. The majority of the individual stratigraphic units which contained coins (48 units out of 62) produced only one to three coins and 12 units contained four to 10 coins. Two units stand out as particularly coin rich. The richest unit, with 25 coins, was a layer directly below the wooden floor of a house, possibly that of a tobacco merchant. Of these coins, 22 were 1/4 öre KM copper coins minted during the reign of Queen Christina, and the other three included one 1 öre KM copper coin, one 1 öre silver coin (dating from 1585), and a rare token of the Köngäs forge. The distribution of coin types in this assemblage certainly appears a little odd, but there is otherwise nothing special to the context of the coins. The 14 coins in the second richest context, in turn, were clustered in a layer associated with a fireplace, but the depositional history of the coins is unclear. The assemblage includes eight 1/4 öre KM copper coins, one 1 öre SM silver coin, and the rest are of different types.
In general, there do not seem to be any obvious differences between the contextual associations of different types of coins, but then again few coin types are common enough to allow any statistically meaningful form of comparison. The 1/4 öre KM copper coins which dominate the entire coin assemblage, for example, were found in all types of contexts, along with other types of coins. Silver coins were found in the same contexts as copper coins, and coins also appeared in various combinations in different stratigraphic contexts. That said, some coin finds do appear to show a clear depositional trend. In five cases coins were associated with building remains so as to suggest possible intentional deposition linked to the laying of foundations. These possible foundation deposits included both copper and silver coins of various types, and comprised between one and three coins.
One case merits a brief comment because it involved two silver coins which had been minted over a century before the founding of Tornio – one in the 1490s and the other around 1513 – the oldest coin finds from the town. The coins were corroded together and were found in a shallow scoop or pit in sterile ground, under the layer of woodchips and splinters associated with the earliest building phase of the town. The pit was associated with building remains, and the coins and the feature in which they were buried may therefore have been deposited as an intentionally placed votive offering. While the exact nature of this and the other four deposits is not entirely clear, the tradition of placing coins in the foundations of buildings is well known and archaeologically attested (e.g. Hukantaival, 2006: 60–62; Korhonen, 2009: 264–267; Merrifield, 1987: 49; see also below), and other types of ‘foundation deposits’ have also been identified in Tornio including ‘offerings’ of iron, ceramics, and even bear claws (Herva, 2010; Herva and Ylimaunu, 2009; Nurmi, 2011: 146–151).
In addition to these five examples of buried coins, there are other finds that might have been used and/or deposited in special circumstances. Two coins have been pierced, apparently to be used as pendants. The first is a counting token from Nuremberg and dates from the second quarter of the seventeenth century. The second is a silver coin, which derives from one of the possible foundation deposits described above, but is also pierced. The practice of piercing coins is well known in all periods of coin use, and while the two examples in the Tornio assemblage are isolated examples, they nonetheless serve to remind us that special meanings were attached to (certain) coins.
The use of perforated medieval coins as amulets or charms, serving as apotropaic badges to ward off evil using the sacred imagery of the cross or the sacral image of the king’s head, has been reviewed by Hall (2012: 76–77). The find of a pierced token in Tornio from the pilgrim destination of Nuremburg may well be explained as a memory token, or talisman. The broader point is that our modern world is saturated with images, and this can lead us to overlook the power of apparently simple images, such as those stamped on coins, in less visually saturated times.
Coins, metals and recycling
The presence of coins in early modern contexts in Tornio and other sites has been taken as a given in Finnish and Swedish archaeology. On a closer inspection, however, it is not self-evident why coins should be found in the first place. There can be little doubt that coins were sometimes lost or became otherwise unintentionally deposited. But if coins were also intentionally discarded, as suggested above, why were they not recycled? On the basis of the Tornio material, at least, recycling of coins could be expected for a number of reasons.
Traces of repair and reuse are common on everyday artefacts especially from seventeenth-century contexts in Tornio (Herva and Nurmi, 2009; Nurmi, 2011; Salo, 2007). Such traces can be observed in different classes of finds, including pottery, clay pipes, and glass. To take but a few examples, potsherds have been worked into spindle whorls and pieces of window glass into counters or gaming pieces. Metal was also reused although the evidence is of course mainly indirect. Iron objects are abundant but dominated by nails. Knives are also commonly found, whereas the rest of the iron assemblage consists of, for instance, occasional keys and tools or their fragments.
The scarcity of other (reusable) metals in the assemblage is conspicuous, however, and lead is a particularly illustrative example. Lead finds from Tornio are few in number, although the metal must have been commonly used especially as cames for holding glass in place within window frames. The few documented scrap pieces of lead weigh only about 100 g in total, which is enough for framing only one-fourth of a single average-sized seventeenth-century Swedish window. The total weight of window glass, on the other hand, is around 12 kg, which equals around 30 average-sized windows (Nurmi, 2011: 145). This disparity between lead and window glass quite clearly indicates that lead cames were systematically collected and reused.
As to copper, copper finds other than coins comprise small artefacts, such as thimbles, pins, and small pieces of cutting waste. The coin finds, which weigh c.1.6 kg in total, make up about 75 per cent of the entire copper assemblage. Copper artefacts have certainly been more common than the copper finds suggest, which can again be taken to suggest recycling of the metal. It is known that small-scale metalworking was practised in the town (Ylimaunu, 2007: 60–68; see also Englund, 2002: 221–223). But while copper coins appear to have been intentionally discarded, they do not seem to have been melted down, even though the coins were made from perfectly good copper and there are good reasons, as seen above, to believe that recycling of metals and other materials was otherwise a common practice. There is no simple explanation to the seeming reluctance to recycle coins, other than the fact that the coins were the property of the Crown, but the question merits some further discussion which will also explore more general attitudes to coinage and money.
The power of coins
Economic factors are obviously important for appreciating the role and significance of money in the northern periphery of early modern Sweden, but certain broader cosmological concepts are also relevant to understanding how people perceived and engaged with coins. This ‘high level’ contextualization does not directly explain particular features observed in archaeological contexts but it helps to look at early modern coins from a different perspective, which in turn generates some insights on ‘belief-related’ uses of money and the apparent reluctance to recycle coins.
The world and its workings were understood very differently in the early modern period from today. An important starting point here is that modern distinctions between the natural and the supernatural, or the practical and the symbolic/ritual, are largely inapplicable to the early modern and especially pre-Enlightenment world (Brück, 1999; Henry, 2008). This is perhaps particularly clear in the northern periphery of Europe where a variety of ‘supernatural’ beings from earthlings and giants to manifold spirits of natural and cultural places were not only believed to exist, but, indeed, were perceived and thought to actively engage with humans within the contexts of everyday life. Likewise, all kinds of things from soils and trees to stone cairns and common artefacts were considered to possess special powers that were, nonetheless, an entirely natural aspect of material things. All things in that world were also connected through correspondences, resemblances, and other magical networks of influence and causality (Herva and Ylimaunu, 2009 with references).
A key point here is that forms of magical thinking and practice cut across everyday life and were embedded in the local mode of being in the world. Elements of broadly animistic-shamanistic concepts of and relationships with the world persisted in the north centuries after the region had become nominally Christianized. They persisted especially in rural culture well into modern times, but were arguably of significance at least in early modern Tornio and other new towns that the Crown of Sweden founded in the previously non-urban northern parts of the kingdom in the seventeenth century (Herva, 2010; Herva and Salmi, 2010; Herva and Ylimaunu, 2009).
Coins could have been imbued with meaning and special powers for various reasons. Folklore indicates that coins and pieces of metal were given as offerings to spirits (Korhonen, 2009: 264). The charms associated with magical uses of money do sometimes specify the material of the coins used (e.g. SKVR I4: 2116; X2: 3204; X2: 4591), 1 but it remains unclear whether or not the material itself was actually considered of particular importance. The special properties attributed to iron in Finnish folk culture are well known (e.g. Oukka, 1976: 65, 68, 70–71; Sarmela, 1994: 131–133), and iron objects appear in foundation deposits and related special contexts in Tornio and elsewhere (e.g. Herva and Ylimaunu, 2009; Hukantaival, 2006: 87–89, 93–94; Tuppi, 2009). Other metals and their properties are sometimes referred to in folklore but do not feature in a similarly important manner as iron. Silver has long-standing associations with belief-related practices in the north, whereas the possible special properties of copper in the historical period are more obscure.
The representational or symbolic nature of money provides another angle on the meanings of coins. Early modern Swedish coins were minted by the Crown and had symbols of regents and the state on them. Coins are sometimes referred to as the ‘king’s money’ or the ‘emperor’s money’ in charms associated with magical uses of coins (e.g. SKVR VII4 loitsut: 3138; IX4: 1613), which might indicate an attempt to draw the authority of regents through money associated with them. Indeed, one recorded charm specifically mentions that a coin deposited in a corner of a house was to bring peace to the household ‘on behalf of the king’ (SKVR X2: 5016). There is also evidence that coins minted by three different kings have intentionally been chosen to be deposited in buildings, and such deposits have been identified in the context of residential buildings and also a church (e.g. Halinen, 2002: 32–33; Hukantaival, 2006: 61; Sarvas, 1982).
In early modern Europe, coins could symbolically or ceremonially represent the king in certain situations (Muir, 2005: 272), but there may also have been a deeper connection between the two in the form of image magic. Coins in this view would have ‘abducted’ something of the power of the king and ‘charged’ coins with agency and special potency (cf. Gell, 1998). This kind of connection was arguably made in some medieval European contexts (Maguire, 1997; Theuws, 2004), and a similar general principle of magical associations, as described above, was at the heart of folk cosmology in the pre-industrial northern periphery of Sweden. To take but one example, ecclesiastical artefacts were sometimes stolen and used for magical purposes in early modern Finland (Eilola, 2003: 60–61), supposedly because they were taken to embody the power of God or the church. It seems possible that coins, too, were considered to possess inherent power, which more or less passively discouraged the destruction of money (in addition to the fact that they were Crown property) and made coins ‘naturally’ suitable for uses in magical practices.
Money, magic, and rationality: Discussion and archaeological implications
While attitudes to and understanding of money have undoubtedly changed in the post-medieval centuries, Finnish folklore suggests that coins continued to be used in various magical practices in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Money was used to claim land from spirits before building a house (Korhonen, 2009: 264–265; SKVR IX4: 1572) and as a payment to spirits when taking supernaturally potent soil from the graveyard (SKVR I4: 27–28). Coins were also used in summoning water spirits or protecting cattle from them (SKVR I4: 36, I4: 1447), as well as releasing cattle from the supernatural ‘binding of the forest’ (SKVR VI2: 5403). Animals could supposedly be protected by hiding coins (or various other things) under or in animal sheds (SKVR I4: 1614, I4: 1617). Money was also employed in healing practices (SKVR I4: 735, VI2: 4492).
Although late in date and rather anecdotal in character, folklore can help not only to interpret archaeological coin finds but also to cast light on how people perceived money in general. Folk beliefs have been employed in the interpretation of apparently intentional deposits of coins in, for example, the foundations of buildings (e.g. Halinen, 2002: 32–33; Hukantaival, 2006: 60–62). It is clear that particular folk beliefs recorded in the nineteenth century cannot be directly projected on specific early modern finds, but general-level continuities in thought and practice are in evidence across centuries, which in principle makes it feasible to draw insight from folklore for the purposes of archaeological interpretation.
But while folklore can be useful for understanding various aspects of life in the early modern past, the common tendency to draw from and consider folk beliefs only in the context of odd or special finds, such as coins deposited in buildings, is problematic in potentially trivializing the influence of folk beliefs on broader patterns of everyday life. Rather than simply a source of ‘explanations’ for occasional special finds, folk beliefs can be understood as reflecting broader ideas about the surrounding world and its workings (Herva, 2010; Herva and Ylimaunu, 2009).
This leads us to the possible broader implications of the use of coins for magical purposes at the rather late date when folk beliefs about coins were recorded. It would be easy to dismiss magical uses of coins, particularly at the time when folklore was recorded, as mere lingering superstitions from earlier times, but they can also be interpreted as indicating continuing ‘animistic’ relationships with the surrounding world. Rather than de-personalizing the traditional animistic kind of relationships with the environment, money became incorporated in the traditional mode of negotiating relationships with spirits associated with various constituents of the natural and cultural environments. Animistic relationships, in other words, became monetized, but nonetheless persisted as a practice at least in more peripheral rural areas until the comparatively recent past.
While money is readily associated with rational thinking in contemporary western society, the use of money to mediate relationships with ‘spiritual’ beings or forces makes sense in the context of the pre-industrial northern world, both at the time when copper money was introduced and when folklore on magical uses of coins was recorded. In addition, the uncontrolled fluctuations in the value of copper coins in the seventeenth century may well have promoted ‘magical’ attitudes to coinage as people attributed agency to the inanimate objects (i.e. coins) which did not do what the people controlling them wanted them to do (cf. Barrett and Johnson, 2003; also Gell, 1998: 18–19). Conversely, the transformation of money into a distinctively symbolic form of material culture – a matter of trust, and indeed of belief – with the separation of the value of money from the material of money may have given rise to the idea that money was by nature a suitable medium for dealing with the ‘spiritual’ world.
Conclusions
Recent research on money in various historical and cultural contexts has made it clear that modern western ideas of money are not universal; rather, the meanings of money and coinage vary within and between cultures (Hall, 2012; Kemmers and Myrberg, 2011; Wynne-Jones and Fleisher, 2012). This article has discussed archaeological coin assemblages from several sites in northern Finland, with a particular emphasis on the town of Tornio, founded in the early seventeenth century. It was shown that the composition of excavated coin assemblages does not appear random, and that there are reasons to believe that some (types of) coins were intentionally discarded.
The differences between the discussed coin assemblages also indicate that coins came to be deposited in different ways in different places, which in turn suggests that people engaged with money differently in different situations. We have suggested that whereas it is well known from archaeology and folklore that coins were used for belief-related purposes in the post-medieval period, the wider implications of such practices have not been adequately explored. We have argued that, rather than showing a deviation from some ‘normal’ use of coinage, belief-related and other non-monetary uses of coins may in fact provide clues as to how coinage was perceived and understood more generally in the northern periphery of post-medieval Europe.